Shoreline
by trufflemores
Summary: Sometimes, Barry gets caught in the Speed Force's momentum and taken to places he doesn't want to go. Luckily, he always has Iris to come home to.


The water is pitch-black and ice-cold this deep, this far-out.

The tiny ripples around Barry are both huge and detached. They belong to a machine greater than anything humans have ever dared to contrive, a monstrous earthen beast capable of waging war on all, leveling not just nations but entire animal kingdoms. The Earth above is not the same place as the Earth below, for up there, birds and bats and bumblebees fly, but down here, snakes and sharks and stupefying arrays of unfathomable creatures share the claim. Effortlessly, they perform the one-two-three x-y-z D flight gifted naturally to so few above. This primordial sea was the place where life cooked, the place where life began, and it is, compositely, unchanged since the first day it sank the world.

The seas are not the sole sovereign here, for far above the churning black waves, the lunar viceroy supervises, leaning aslant in the violet sky, quarter-full, a celestial intruder out-of-sight out-of-mind. The tide that it commands yaws back and forward like a boat tied to a dock sinking and swaying with the rise-and-fall of water. The tide holds little sway here, this deep, this far-out, but the back-and-forth seesaw of waves up above is mesmerizing, even if it is only felt-but-not-seen.

Air bubbles float innocuously out of reach, grasping for the stars far above, fleeing to the land of the living as Barry sinks down, down, down. Without cognitive functions, astronautic impulses overtake his limbs. His arms and legs careen gently out of control, suspended freely in the ultra-dark, destined for entrainment in the basalt eons below, to a tapestry telling this shifting story of time, of a Space-Below, of a place known less intimately than the moon

Then a powerful arm snakes around his chest, unexpectedly human, and if he could move he would twist away in surprise, but the purple paralyzing sensation does not abate, and they rise inexorably upwards, propelled by smooth, powerful kicks. Chasing the known world, they grade from royal-navy-Egyptian blue to sapphire and steel and azure, too. Barry can no sooner see his companion than blink, staring instead at the world around him as it dissolves and a wash of breathtakingly cold air hits him.

He's locked so convulsively, so excruciatingly into stillness that they break the surface and he cannot draw a breath. His raw straining lungs refuse to embrace the hot temple air of this fire world that left the sea behind long-ago and staked out civilizations on high ground. High ground, like it could protect them, like it could save them, but then like children they ventured back to the water and stayed close to the shore, trusting it, trusting it, until it found them, in waves, in storms, in mighty seas, and destroyed everything in its path.

The world comes slowly into focus as the mythical person behind him passes him from sea to open air. Over the edge of a bobbing boat, half a dozen hands strain for him, latching onto Barry's shirt and shoulders and legs as they reel him on board. He feels almost like a god of old, worshipped by the supplicating masses, hands grasping at him, begging him for help, but there are too-many-to-save, too-many-to-stop, and then like the people of old who lost their gods, they attack.

What took the ocean four minutes to do takes A.R.G.U.S. four hours to undo. A.R.G.U.S.: the Advanced Research Group United Support. It's a mouthful even after they force the water from his lungs and air back into them, breaking whatever they have to in order to accomplish it, knowing-it-will-all-heal-eventually. As they tangle with the ocean, he thinks they deserve a new name: A.L.I.E.N., Autonomous Liaisons In Earthly Negotiations.

Coughing diphtherically, he finds an acronym in the great No-Name: O.C.E.A.N., Ordered Chaos Encompassing All Nature. It is the end and the beginning, the place where life emerged and settled out, fossilizing, reorganizing. Lying flat on his back under the stars, he finds himself utterly removed from the people around him and the hands grasping his own intermittently, as firmly as they can and still nowhere as impressive as the waters pitching the boat back-and-forth, back-and-forth.

Transforming hypothermic flesh from critical to calibrated conditions, they tell him stories by their artificial fireside. According to his rescuers – for he has to call them rescuers, even if they still seem scarcely real to him, more alien than human – he was supposed to rendezvous with the A.R.G.U.S. team after – getting rid of F.I.R.E.S.T.O.R.M., he surmises, but he doesn't know, he can't be sure, because nothing is ever spelled out beforehand with these jaunts and nobody knows he's not _their_ Flash.

But from the A.R.G.U.S. agents operating under a radically dissimilar model, it happened like so: he was still en route to their location when the suit's vitals plunged, coding-red. The tracker in his sleeve only lasted ninety-eight seconds in water that registered a jarring forty-one degrees Fahrenheit; he didn't last much longer, sinking under the surface after an incalculable time. He was close enough to shore that they got the team out to him in minutes. In the dark, they couldn't have found him if his abnormally high body temperature hadn't persisted past his suit's mechanics failed. His heat signature was barely a blip on their radars, a drop of silence in an ocean of noise. Yet inside thirty minutes from the final transmission, they had divers in the water, suited-up and searching for any signs of life. And somehow, impossibly somehow, they found him.

Ronnie Raymond hauled him from the water.

He knows this because Ronnie's face appears above him at some point, explaining in a voice from a vacuum that he got Barry in time and he's going to be fine, he's going to be fine, and Barry wants to ask what world led to Ronnie's employment at A.R.G.U.S., but he makes no sound, and eventually Ronnie walks away. Others come to him, again talking in that ninety-miles-away tone, that bad-radio-connection garble that leads him to close his eyes until it all passes, and sleep sweeps over him instead.

They shore and admit him to some hospital and things are different, here, far different than anything he knows, but he has little time to dwell. He doesn't open his eyes, muting his vision, muffling his senses to the glaring yellow lights, the strobe of humans passing incessantly through his field of view. They keep blankets on him, keep a warm IV on him, keep a close eye on him, and somehow he senses this isn't just an A.R.G.U.S. facility at all but a standard hospital, confirmed when he dares to open his eyes and sees a reporter pressing hopefully up against the glass of his room, thwarted by A.R.G.U.S. agents on either side.

The Flash, The Flash, The Flash is back, the story goes, spreading down the halls. He keeps his eyes closed and tries to sink back under the silent empty waves, pressing as far as he can get from them, even as the burgeoning pain and the inescapable shame of being caught compromised persists, but The Flash is back, The Flash is back. They're almost happy to see him, and he's disappointed that he can't even feign joy to see them, but they hurt him, and help him, and somehow break him apart and put him back together without dissolving the mortal line.

The mortal belongs to the ocean, to the moon, to the Earth-all-encompassing, and even the agents and staffers cannot cross it, cannot revolutionize to the point of unconstrained revolt, they push him farther than he wants to go when the waves, the waves, the waves below beckon encouragingly to just let go, let go, there's nowhere to run, nowhere-else-to-go.

But that's not true, and it's that – truth – that keeps him awake and alive. He came here from another world, a world that still needs him, a world that is still waiting for him, a place where his family see him-and-only-him as The Flash. His confusion is justified, for in that world, the thought of being formally hospitalized, even-masked, even-Flashed, is the ultimate full-stop, no-go.

He doesn't learn much about this new world, this unusual other-life-out-there, but he doesn't need to know much to get by. He's a hitchhiker, a less-is-more itinerant, a wanderer traveling from world to world not in search of answers but in search of universality, of cohesion, of a sense of wholeness. A sense of home.

The Speed Force sent him here, and he doesn't know what to make of the underlying message. _Tread carefully_ comes closest to the feeling of unease and humility. Closing his eyes, he promises to, promises to be careful if it will be kind to this world and these people he does not know nor will ever truly learn, and when he opens them again the rest of the world has frozen around him.

Proceeding with great caution so-as-not-to-disturb-nor-alter-profoundly, he detaches, disentangles, and stands from the bed. He wanders toward the wall and a door that wasn't there before opens to him. He steps towards the brilliant white curtain, more real with every measured pace, I'm-here, I'm-alive, I'm-coming-home.

Then he passes over the threshold, and for a moment he seems to stand between the two worlds, the mortal and immortal, the Speed Force and the multiverse, time and place intertwined until all Earths are simply Earth-1.

One step, one more tiny inclination of his being towards one-not-the-other, and the world he came from vanishes, and the world he returns to appears. It's nighttime here, too, which is less jarring than daytime would be. He cannot know how much time has passed, but a sense of great ease descends over him as he looks around and sees a countryside he knows.

Exhausted and turbulent, he Flashes and passes at the door to the apartment, alight with the energy from two worlds, taken-and-given, always fluxing, before tapping gently to announce his presence. He'd let himself in and has, but his key is gone, and it seems apropos that of all the things the ocean of another Earth took from him, his way-home would be it.

Then sleepy footsteps, barely audible precede the turning handle, and Barry does not hold his shoulders straight, but he does muster a relieved smile when Iris Ann West-Allen holds open the door. She smiles when she sees him, equally relieved and equally fatigued. Dressed in one of his gray S.T.A.R. Labs' sweaters, she holds out her arms, hands obscured by the sleeves, and he steps into them, hugging her, holding her like he cannot, nor would ever, cling to those other worlds.

She is his anchor, calling him home, and no matter how far he drifts, he welcomes the weight of her in his arms, of her palms pressed to his back, her unspeaking support purified to its absolute essence. She has taken _I love you_ and transformed it from a statement to a kinetic state of being, a feeling which changes in sunshine, in rain, in long days and slow, in moments of darkness and moments of joy, in laughter, in song, in every breath. She has taken the simple act of coming home and made it real to him, sacred to him, profoundly important to him.

He rocks almost imperceptibly on his feet, rocking her with him, not to the sea's indifferent, almost violent pace, but to his own steady rhythm, soft as song, fleeting as candlelight. And when he is too tired to even stand, they wander back, and curl up beside each other, and he rests his head on her stomach like-old-times and closes his eyes as she runs her fingers through his hair.

He's loved her since before he knew what love meant, since time was their own music box, dancing and dancing and dancing, an endless pattern that slowly faded out as they grew. He aches to be held by her forever, ensconced in her warmth, protected by her embrace. But he also wants to stay, immovably, unalterably, between her and the forces that would hurt her, between her and the pains that would inflict themselves upon her, between her and the chaotic otherness out there.

She knows and loves him for who he is, for Barry and The Flash, but she cannot know what it means to love them both fully. She does not know Barry's obligation, Barry's undying need to be with the Speed Force, how it is as much a part of him as it is apart from him. She does not see the Speed Force's alternating compassion and almost-indifference to him, only knows it through him, shielded and set free by his actions alone. She understands, but she cannot consume the full breadth of truths that surround him, the multiplicities of existence that reach for him, tugging him onto foreign shores and asking for miracles.

But maybe she doesn't need to – and maybe he doesn't want her to. Theirs is a safe, secluded space, a sense of _home_ that even the vast unfeeling cosmos cannot take from him. Theirs is a marginal existence, eked out on one little world, one-of-so-many, and he knows that his life to those who rescued him will only be missed in the context of _where is our Flash?_ But his life to her is more than the role he plays, the role he fills, the person he must be in other contexts.

He'll always be Barry, and she'll always be Iris.

He falls asleep to the steady, inextinguishable drum-beat of her heart, safe at last.


End file.
